: Can I self-publish on a reputable publishing platform, and how much would it cost? With the barrier to having a publisher sign a new author seemingly high, especially without prior success or

Vote Up Vote Down

I'm in a similar situation, with a background in business, some savings and an understanding of how I would approach such a project were it in my comfort zone (i.e. in my company).

k is probably too much - you'd lose the better part of it without recognising the ROI unless you have a clear, structured plan all the way down the process. I've chosen to work with Type&Tell, which is a self-pub spin off from Bonnier. They impressed me at the London Book Fair over competitors for several reasons:

they have a good reputation as a publishing house and have clear expertise from the mothership
they offer clear, concise services and are approachable if you're not sure what you need
they don't take royalties, which means you pay upfront and manage your own risk afterwards

My background is online advertising and large-scale lead generation so I'm comfortable running my own marketing. Therefore I was looking for a company who could offer just the final editing, design and logistics of my book. Total costs to get it to market will be ~k which includes marketing materials.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

I see this question is over 2 years old so you've probably already made a decision and gone one way or the other, but for the benefit of others who come along:

There are three issues to consider:

Getting your book physically printed.
Getting your book listed in on-line sellers, like Amazon and Barnes & Noble's website.
Marketing your book.
Getting your book stocked in bookstores or department stores with a book section.

As to #1 and #2 , this is easy these days. There are several companies out there, like CreateSpace, Lulu, and Lightning Source, that will print your book with a trivial upfront investment. I forget the exact numbers and I'm sure they change but they're like or so depending on which company and which plan you choose. They will then get you on Amazon and other on-line sellers with little effort and little or no expense.

But these places don't do any useful marketing. Some will do marketing for extra fees, but in my humble opinion the marketing options they offer aren't very useful. It's up to you to do any marketing on your own. You can create a web site, take out ads in magazines, get a booth at conventions, go door-to-door, whatever.

Getting a self-published book into bookstores -- assuming you're not already a well-known author -- is extremely difficult. I've been on forums where self-published authors talk about the efforts they've gone to to get in bookstores, and there's lot of talk about how much work they did and how many contacts they made and how many encouraging conversations they had, but very few actually got their books on shelves. Most of those who did were people who got a specialty store to carry their book rather than a bookstore, like somebody who wrote a book on collecting antiques got it an antique shop. Frankly, unless you have reason to believe you have a special in, like your brother-in-law owns the bookstore, I wouldn't waste my time. Concentrate on other avenues. If you get to the point where readers recognize your name, then work on the bookstores.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

I just joined the site, so you may have already acted on this, but I would definitely recommend going with self-publishing, as long as you don't use a subsidy or vanity publisher. You can go to sites like Kindle Direct Publishing, Smashwords, or Barnes&Noble and find information on self-publishing e-books or go to CreateSpace for print books. All of these options are free and can allow you to get a finished product out to the public in much faster time than a traditional publisher. Each of these options will allow you to publish for free, so there really isn't a cost factor involved.

In addition to that, you can get much higher royalties by using any of these services than you would with a traditional publisher. You would also be better off than using a subsidy publisher, because you don't pay for these services. You might want to spend a little money to get a good book cover and to have someone professionally edit your book, but you should be spending that money anyway if you were using a subsidy publisher. Below are some ranges for these types of services.

Book covers: -0

Editing: -0 (depends on size of book)

I have two fantasy novels that I self-published over the last few months, and I have already recovered the money I spent on them for book covers and editing. There are a whole lot of authors who are starting to go with this self-publishing model, and I highly recommend it!

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

If you're willing to take a rather unorthodox approach, you could try using a micro-investment service like Kickstarter to attract investors. This isn't the full-service company you're looking for, but it could get you some venture capital to put toward publishing and marketing costs.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

What you're thinking of is vanity publishing. A vanity publishing house is one that will publish your book, but you pay all of the costs. You pay for the marketing, the editing, the cover art, etc. Basically all they do is print the book and put it in stores for you.

And to be honest, if you go this route, you're going to be laughed at in the publishing world. Money is supposed to flow to the author, not the other way around. If you then decide to go into traditional publishing, they most likely won't count that book as a prior publishing credit, since anyone with a couple thousand dollars can have their books printed.

If your book isn't good, a traditional publisher isn't going to take it on no matter how much money you wave at them. Not only does the publisher need to be able to sell the book, but they need to maintain their reputation. If they start publishing poor quality manuscripts, they'll get less submissions and their sales will drop as well. So unless you plan on funding them with quite a bit of money, they're not going to blink.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

I suspect the sort of company you are looking for isn't out there, but I will happily retract my answer if someone can point out an example. I would be interested to find out such a company exists.

What you're looking for seems to be along the lines of the standard self-publishing model, but with two caveats:

The ability to attract investors for a book
The ability to get the book into the big chain stores

The problem is that both investors and chain stores want some level of assurance that the book can sell enough to make them money. The author being able to afford a few thousand dollars is not a good indicator that his/her book will be successful. I don't see how a company could attract investors or get books placed in chain stores without a strong editorial process to sift out the books that will sell.

However, if their submission process is just as rigorous as the traditional publishers, why would anyone want to go through it when the traditional publishers offer the same thing for free?

(0)